Author:

The Advanced Security Acceleration Project (ASAP-SG)

Year:

2011

Abstract:

This document presents the security profile for wide-area monitoring, protection, and control (WAMPAC) of the electric grid, specifically leveraging synchrophasor technology. This profile addresses security concerns associated with the use of phasor measurements in electric system operational decisions, whether these decisions are made off-line, real-time but manually, or through automated processes. The recommendations made herein are based on stated system architectural and functional assumptions, and offer a singular security baseline for overall use of synchrophasor technology with tailored subsets of recommendations where variations in system deployment or usage occur.
This document defines a reference architecture, a set of use cases to define system functionality, and a set of security controls for systems and components that implement the use cases. The security controls in this document are inspired by and intended to cover the application of technical requirements found in NIST Interagency Report (IR) 7628: Guidelines for Smart Grid Cyber Security to synchrophasor systems and technology. The underlying approach behind this document was therefore to (1) study real-world use of synchrophasor systems, (2) define the function of these systems by presenting a reference architecture that defines abstract roles and use cases, (3) map the architecture's roles to real-world synchrophasor systems, (4) define broad security objectives for synchrophasor systems, (5) identify potential failures for each role in the context of the use cases, (6) define security controls to address the failures, and (7) assign controls to the roles.
The primary audience for this document is organizations that are developing or implementing solutions requiring or providing WAMPAC functionality through the use of synchrophasor technology. This document is written for system owners, system implementers, and security engineers with at least a year of experience in securing electric utility field operations.

Document Type:

Technical paper

Source:

The Advanced Security Acceleration Project for the Smart Grid (ASAP-SG)